Tip Pool Distributor: End the "Why Did I Get Less Than Her?" Argument
Enter a shift's pooled tips, the eligible staff and their hours, and your pool rules — then let the tool compute each person's share, show the math, route it to a manager for approval, and export a clean tip distribution CSV for payroll. The leftover penny is handled deterministically so the splits always add back to the pool exactly.
A logged-in tool where you enter the pooled tip total for a shift or period, list the eligible staff and their hours, pick a split method (by hours, by role-weighted points, or equal share), and the agent computes each person's share with the full math shown. A manager reviews the split and the rounding, gets flagged if an owner or manager is mistakenly included, approves once, and you export a tip distribution CSV for payroll plus a per-person breakdown — with the cents always summing back to the pool exactly.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your tip pool rules (who's eligible, weighting method, points per role)
- Hours worked per eligible person (a CSV export is fine)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Splitting a tip pool by hand is the kind of small task that quietly eats a manager's night and then comes back to bite them. You add up the pool, you pull hours off the schedule, you do some mental math about who counts and who doesn't, and you scribble numbers onto a printout. Then someone looks at their share, looks at a coworker's, and asks the question every hospitality manager dreads: "why did I get less than her?"
And you can't always answer cleanly, because the math lived in your head. Did the busser count for a full share or a half share? Did you remember that the person who left at 9 only worked four hours? Did the pennies actually add up to the pool, or did you round everyone up and quietly eat the difference? When the split is opaque, every payday becomes a negotiation, and an honest mistake looks like favoritism.
There's also a legal trap hiding in the spreadsheet. In most places, owners and managers generally can't take a cut of a tip pool — but when you're keying names into a grid at 11pm, it's easy to drop a salaried supervisor in by accident. That one slip can turn a friendly pool into a compliance problem.
What you'll build
A simple, logged-in web tool that does the tip-pool math for you, in the open, every time. You enter the pooled total for a shift or pay period, list who's eligible and their hours, and choose how the pool should be divided — by hours worked, by role-weighted points (a bartender might be worth 1.5 points to a barback's 1.0), or as an equal share. The tool computes each person's exact share, shows the arithmetic behind it, and distributes the leftover penny in a fixed, explainable order so the shares always sum back to the pool to the cent.
Before any of it counts, a manager sees the full split on one screen — every person, every share, the rounding, and a clear flag if anyone who shouldn't be in the pool (like an owner or a manager) has been included. The manager approves once. Only then does the tool produce a tip distribution CSV in the columns your payroll system expects, plus a per-person breakdown you can hand to staff that answers "why did I get this number?" before they even ask.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a complete, paste-and-go runbook. The very first thing it does is interview you about your business — it asks how you run your pool today, what roles you have and what each is worth, where your hours come from, how you handle partial shifts and people who clock in late, and what your payroll import actually needs to see. It turns your answers into a short tailored spec, reads it back to you for a thumbs-up, and only then starts building. You get a tool shaped around your bar or salon, not a generic calculator you have to bend to fit.
Inside you'll find: the discovery interview, the exact data model for pools and eligible staff and shares, three pluggable split methods (hours, role points, equal), the deterministic penny-rounding logic so the math always reconciles, the manager approval screen with the owner/manager eligibility flag, the audit trail, the duplicate guard, and both the live build and a no-integration fallback that runs entirely off entered totals and an hours CSV.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This isn't a throwaway calculator — it's built like a tool that touches people's pay, because it does. Every plan in this library bakes in the same controls, and this one is no exception:
- Login so only your team can open it.
- Row-level security so each location only ever sees its own pools and staff — never another store's numbers.
- A complete audit trail: who created the pool, who approved it, what the split was, and exactly when — so a disputed payday has a paper trail.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts the split, a manager reviews the per-person shares and the rounding, and nothing exports to payroll until a person approves.
- A duplicate guard keyed on the pool plus the shift or period, so the same shift can't be split and paid twice.
- An eligibility flag that warns when someone who generally can't share in a tip pool (an owner or a manager) has been added.
Who it's for
Restaurant, bar, café, and salon managers — anyone who runs a tip pool and is tired of hand-calculating shares, eating rounding differences, and defending the math on payday. If you've ever fielded "why did I get less than her?" and wished you could just show the numbers, this is for you. No coding experience needed; if you can describe how your pool works, the agent builds the rest.
You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the tool to your floor.